From Tech Debt to Time to Value

Client Overview

Tava Health is a virtual-first behavioral health provider connecting employees to licensed therapists through a modern, software-enabled care platform. With nationwide coverage, deep employer relationships, and an integrated EMR, telehealth, billing, and referral system, Tava delivers high-quality, accessible mental health support for workers and their families.

The Problem: Engineering Was Carrying a Burden It Never Should Have Owned

Tava's promise to employers and employees was simple: fast, reliable access to mental health care. But underneath that promise, the team was fighting a losing battle against insurance data that couldn't be trusted. More than half of the standard eligibility responses coming through Tava's clearinghouse were unusable. Certain insurance plans routinely returned false negatives. Complex third-party administrators required extensive manual review just to get a straight answer. And because requests ran in monthly batches instead of real time, patients and internal teams alike were left waiting on information that should have been immediate.

The real cost showed up in engineering. Tava's team had built and was constantly maintaining plan-specific exception logic, managing multiple clearinghouse fallbacks, and running fragile dual synchronous/asynchronous workflows that failed unpredictably. That's not what a 215-person, Series B behavioral health company should be spending its engineering time on — but every hour spent patching insurance logic was an hour not spent building the product.

Sohar's Approach: Absorb the Complexity So Tava Didn't Have To

Tava didn't need another API to integrate. It needed someone to take ownership of a problem that had nothing to do with its actual product — the specific, maddening variability of how different insurance plans and administrators respond to eligibility requests — so its engineers could go back to building.

Sohar's approach was to fully absorb that complexity rather than hand Tava a toolkit to manage it itself:

• Structured, normalized outputs so Tava's systems never had to parse inconsistent raw responses again.
• Asynchronous webhooks that automatically retried requests when responses came back slow or partial.
• Automated fallback workflows, including portal requests and phone calls, handled entirely by Sohar's own support team — not Tava's.
• Carve-out detection intelligence to correctly route plans that would otherwise return generic or incomplete benefit data.
• Plan-specific enrichment for coverage descriptions too vague to act on out of the box.
• Error breakdowns that helped Tava improve the insurance data it was collecting further upstream, closing the loop rather than just patching around it.

The result was an integration that took roughly three weeks of a single engineer's time — even while Tava was mid-transition on a parallel billing platform migration — because the burden of ongoing maintenance sat with Sohar, not with Tava's roadmap.

The Outcome

Failed patient intakes dropped 60% at the point of access. Engineering maintenance requirements fell 90%, freeing Tava's team to return to building rather than firefighting. Patient conversion rose 12%, and eligibility and verification responses now resolve with 94%+ accuracy at a consistent ~30-second P95 latency. With reliable coverage data now embedded upstream, Tava is building toward pre-service cost estimation, real-time financial transparency for employees, and stronger employer reporting — work that wasn't possible while the team was still fighting fires downstream.

How It Works, If You're Curious

Tava's results came from three products working together — Discovery, Verification, and Network Status — but the story here isn't the product list. It's that Sohar took on the operational burden of insurance complexity entirely, so a 215-person engineering team could spend three weeks integrating instead of years maintaining.